Tell me your experience with the best tech rockstar
Aug 31, 2021
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You know the type.
The 10x engineer.
The coding machine.
The person who single handedly finishes the project over the weekend, and fixes few other things on the way.
The soft spoken Richard Hendricks IRL.
My experience: shit was broken, nobody had an idea why, gave up while this ever-lazy clock puncher person stays late because things just got interesting and fixes the issue in 2 hrs by going 4 layers down to the os networking stack.
#engineering #software #swe
Tc:500k
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The first thing that shocked me was that this new PE was only 27 years old. I’ll admit I felt a bit annoyed and kind of jealous - here I am close to 33 years old and only SDE3! As we got to talking it became apparent to me that this guy was next level - he clearly knew how to think big and was asking questions about our service that had me stumped. I didn’t hear from him for a few days, and figured he was reading through the onboarding wikis.
Later that week he submitted his first CR and, I’ll be honest, I was shocked. He skipped the onboarding assignments and instead started to pick up issues that were in our sprint. The CR he submitted was for an issue I had been working on for the past 3 weeks - we had a nasty race condition that was causing fatals to be thrown almost every other request. What had taken me over 3 weeks of investigation took him a mere two days, and his solution involved a major refactoring of our entire SQS processing package. Our L7 PM was so happy it looked like he could cry - we were finally green for prime day.
I’m stil shocked. I finally mustered up the courage to ask him to lunch this Monday to learn more about his past work experience, and he explained to me that he didn’t have a degree and has been programming since he was 12, and had just finished a 12 month internship as bag boy at Albertsons. As I looked into his eyes I saw years of engineering experience and wisdom... it was as if I was staring into Pandora’s box.
This engineer kept saying it could be done better in house, and pointed out major issues with the vendor's work.
The engineer took a weekend to write the entire thing and had a workable product by Monday which surpassed the vendor's work. Super clean code.
Unfortunately the whole project / department was cancelled shortly afterwards 😆 because google loves to kill things
- Paul Buchheit (https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit)
Reporting wo the ) at the end